Blog About Your Blog recently posted about the Top 20 Contest Blogs.    These are blogs that tell you all about contests happening around the web.  BAYB ranked the blogs by Google Page Rank and Alexa, Bloglines and Technorati Scores.  The number one blog is The Prize Blog, with a total score of eleven.   The Prize Blog is even touting its own contest - give them a link and you could win a 2GB Wooden Memory Stick.  Very cool looking!

Head on over to BAYB to see the entire list!

Page rank is important, but what is it?

Page rank is a system for ranking web pages and was developed by Google.  Page Rank relies on linking to determine a web page’s value.  Let’s say your web page has a link on it to Amazon.com.  This link would get Amazon.com one vote.  But this isn’t the end.  Google also analyzes your web page.  If it finds your web page to be important, the vote is weighted heavier.

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.

All links are not created equal.  Having an incoming link from a link farm could penalize you.  Recently, Google has taken steps to penalize paid text links as well.  Although I have no idea how they can determine what is a paid text link and what is not.

To create more inbound links to your page, try exchanging links with other relevant sites.

We all know that Page Rank is gold.  The higher the page rank, the more gold you have!  Since this is a new blog, I am looking into ways of increasing its page rank.   One suggestion - join forums.  Join multiple forums that are related to your blog.  Make sure that you create a signature line in your profile so that every time you leave a comment, your name AND website URL appear.  You are now receiving links back to your blog and advertising your blog at the same time accomplishing two things at once.

A feed reader lets you read, listen or watch a feed without ever having to visit the source.  The first step to be able to read a feed is to choose a feed reader.  Some feed readers are free, while others charge a small fee.  A few popular feed readers include google, bloglines and yahoo.

After signing up for a feed reader, visit a blog you want to subscribe.  This blog has icons at the top right that allow you to subscribe using three of the popular feed readers.  You can also subscribe using any other feed reader by choosing the “Subscribe in a reader” link, or you can even subscribe by email (more about this service in a later post).   As long as you are currently logged into your reader, the subscription will be added.

Suppose you visit a blog and you can’t find the subscribe button.  You can open up your feed reader and subscribe to a feed from there by typing in the feed url (usually http://thedomainname.com/feed).

Happy reading!

When I first started blogging, I was so confused by a blogging term that kept popping up - feed. I had no idea what that was or how it worked.  After some intensive reading, this is what I discovered.

A feed is something that you can subscribe to. It can be text, audio or video. You can watch, listen or read the feed with a feed reader. For savvy computer users, feeds make their lives so much easier. Instead of visiting every blog, every day, to read the posts, the user just opens up their favorite feed reader and browses all the posts at once.

The feed to your blog is usually http://www.yourdomainname.com/feed.  But this line in a browser, with your domain name, and you should see a document tree with a rss tag at the top.  A blog that has a feed will usually display a feed icon.  Most popular blogging platforms automatically produce a feed for your blog.